Celestial
by RadianceRose
Summary: The brightest lights can be seen even through your eyelids.' Luna and Neville contemplate the reality of their own existence and the world around them. In the end though, isn't everyone's reality a little different? Luna/Neville. Lunev. Oneshot.


She was an enigma. A ghost among ghosts, a glow in the shadows. Shining brightly, but still completely invisible. She was the brunt of jokes, and he was an unlikely protector. He was an extra. A face in the crowd, an apple on the tree, at the top where no one bothered to look. He stood by those on whom the light shone brightest, but he was always in the shadows of glory. He was always the side-kick, never the hero, and she was an unlikely companion.

And yet, there they were, grass-stained, life-stained, trouble-stained, staring up at the stars, eyes closed. 'The brightest lights can be seen even through your eyelids,' she'd said. That was true. He could see her face, ethereal and soft in its beauty, framed by long, cornsilk hair, even when his eyes were shut. In his double life of hero and stage hand, she was the only constant. Even when his eyes were closed, even when he was asleep, she was there.

It was an unlikely friendship, an impossible daydream, an incontrovertible euphoria. But even in the darkest times, even when your eyes are shut and the world is bathed in night, even when you can't make out your own hand an inch in front of your face, the brightest lights still shine like celestial beacons. The stars, _Stella_, and the moon, _Luna_. He smiled softly, a light breeze through the grassy, silent night tousling his brown hair. Yes, she was everywhere, wasn't she? She was the moon, and she was the sun. She was the brightest light, even if he was the only one who saw it.

He opened his eyes, taking in the celestial darkness and serenity of the English countryside at night. When there were no classes to go to, no Quidditch games to play, no dark lords to fight or meetings to attend, the grounds grew peaceful and restive with the students in their dormatories. It was as if the school, maybe even the world, belonged to nothing and no one more than the two of them, Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom, at that moment. It was a feeling you could get used to.

Luna was laying beside him in the grass and the night, an astronomy book layed beside her, her wand laying in it to hold their place. They had, before deciding to look at the stars without seeing them, without guiding themselves by previous experiences of themselves or anyone else, been finding the constellations that the book listed and charted, but they had long since set the book aside. Luna's eyes were still closed, and Neville could barely make out in the starlit darkness that she was smiling.

"The stars are beautiful," she remarked softly, without opening her eyes.

"Beautiful," Neville agreed.

Then there was silence again, and for a while they both just looked at the stars, and the world, and each other. Then finally, she opened her eyes and glanced over towards him. "Do you ever think that maybe none of this is real?"

"Like life is just a dream?" he asked. It was something he'd considered before.

She nodded softly, her face lit gently by the stars above them. "Or maybe a book. What if we're all just characters in some book for other people to read. Maybe people read the story that we think is reality and they laugh at it and think to themselves 'this could never happen in real life'," she smiled her glowing, ghostly smile. Neville smiled too. "And maybe they're not even living in reality either. Maybe there's another world of people who read their story and laugh at how fictional that story sounds to them. It's like a circle of false reality."

"I don't know," he said at last, rolling over to his side to face her. "It's something to think about, isn't it? And then, when you're done thinking how many realities there could be, you realize that maybe every one is fake. Or maybe that every one is real. Or would that even be possible?"

Luna moved onto her side too, her nose almost touching Neville's. She looked into the distence absently, her pale blue eyes shining like the stars above their heads. "Maybe. Who knows how far reality can be bent before it would break entirely?" she paused, twining her finger around the stem of a daisy which was sprouting obstinately out of the well-tramped grass. "But suppose that our reality isn't true. If we aren't really real, what does that make anything else? Would a daisy be made up? Would a thestral? Would the stars? Would everything be fake, or just us?"

He didn't know any answer to say. Finally, Neville murmured aloud something he'd been thinking for several minutes. "If we are just characters in story, though, then we must have a really loony writer."

She smiled that celestial smile again. "That's true. Who ever could just imagine something like the stars and then write them so that a person who'd never seen one could imagine it too?" She paused, letting the daisy stem unravel from her finger. "Loony, maybe. After all, they would have thought up You-Know-Who with that imagination too."

He smiled. "They must be an awfully good writer too, though."

Luna nodded.

"After all," he said, glad for the dark to hide the colour in his cheeks, "I couldn't ever think up a girl as amazing as you."

They closed their eyes, and looked through their eyelids at the celestial sky. She squeased his hand gently. It was a soft, firm hold that sounded like Christmas and smelled like the symphony. Neville smiled through the darkness, his eyes closed as tightly as his grip.

"The best author in the world," Luna whispered. "They wrote me a friend like you, Neville. I could never dream up something so fantastical in a thousand centures. I could dream talking with a demiguise, or capturing a crumple horned snokack, or any millions of things, but I could never dream up you."

Neville smiled. It was nice, after a life of being a B-character, to break out into someone's main storyline. To have someone who cared about him like he cared. Even if it wasn't everyone's reality, this was his, with the celestial sky above them and Luna's fingers interlaced with his.

They talked like that until the stars began to go off to their beds. Luna yawned once, mellifluously. "Tired," she said, lids drooping slightly over her luminous cerulian eyes. Neville nodded sleepily. Their hands were still tightly clasping. Neither had dared break the contact for even a moment for fear that no other moment would arise where it would seem a likely thing to do. Things like this were special, Neville had decided, and could not be let go of lightly. Even if it did make your palms a little sweaty.

The sun's luminous rays had begun to peak their tendrilous tips over the English hills before them. "You know, Neville," Luna said pensively, tucking her wand behind her ear and sitting up, grase blades imprinted in a criss cross pattern on her knees from laying there all night, "I don't really think this could all be fake."

Neville sat up too, yawning slightly. "What do you mean?"

"Well," she said, arranging her slight, pale legs in a cross-legged position, bare toes burrying themselves in the soft grass, "this just doesn't seem fake to me. It seems real, not like a story or a dream," she paused, wriggling her toes experimentally and closing the astronomy book. "Or maybe this is a dream, only we're only really awake when we're dreaming."

Neville nodded. He closed his eyes, and watched the sun begin to arc into the sky, turning the clouds pink. "Just like how you can only really see when your eyes are closed."

She nodded, even though he couldn't see it, and held onto his hand. "Exactaley," she said, and he could feel her smile.

And with their eyes closed, they watched the sun rise into the celestial sky.

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**Author's Drabble:**

Something new. Totally new. I've always wanted to do something for this wonderful pairing, which is, by the way, one of the least AND most canon that I support at once, and pretty much my favorite pairing. Lunev rains supreme. I can't believe JK would epilogue Luna off to anyone other than Neville. They're just… gah. They're perfect. Everything about them is just perfect. Not to mention that I love them both tremendous amounts, with Neville as my 1 favorite Harry Potter character and Luna a close second. (Dean's number three, if you were wondering). Anyhow, I liked this idea, and I like how it turned out.

Much love and nargles,

~RadianceRose (aka ainekatt)


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